RUNAWAY BUREAUCRACY AND CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT: WHY REFORMS FAIL

Attempts to reign-in runaway regulatory bureaucracy fail because the bureaucracy has all the important resources. The bureaucracy also holds the upper hand in policy-making because Congress has neither the time nor inclination to effect legislative control and oversight. The authors examine the travails of the Federal Trade Commission during the 1970s to show the blurred distinction between bureaucratic autonomy and legislative control.     

Political Control versus Bureaucratic Values: Reframing the Debate

The literature on political control of bureaucracy reveals that bureaucracies are highly responsive to political forces. This paper argues that the political control literature misses evidence from other academic literature that bears directly on this phenomenon. Specifically, researchers need to consider the values of the bureaucracy in any effort to assess the degree of political control. An empirical test is presented using a data set from public education. Results show bureaucratic values to be far more influential in explaining bureaucratic outputs and outcomes than political factors. These findings suggest that a reinterpretation of previous empirical research is urgently in order.     

政党整合下的官僚制行政——当代中国公共行政的组织行为分析

当代中国公共行政的基本模式是在中国共产党的领导下由官僚机构实行国家管理的结构.党是国家管理的核心.因此,党的组织行为方式明显地影响了官僚制行政的方式,具体来说使得公共行政表现为三方面的特征公共行政的政治化、意识形态色彩和人格化.这些特征在一定程度上造成了公共行政的失范和无序,党必须严格规范其行为,才能够保证官僚体系程序化、理性化和公正化的实施管理.     

Vertical transfers and the appropriation of resources by the bureaucracy: the case of Brazilian state governments

The purpose of this study is to explore whether the transfers received by state governments in Brazil are being appropriated by the bureaucracy as wages. The wage differential between the public and private sectors was used as a measure of this appropriation, following the technique for wage decomposition proposed by Oaxaca. Our results show that transfers stimulate appropriation by the bureaucracy, but that private groups existing within the states contend for these resources. The results also indicate that the resources appropriated are distributed uniformly between the various groups composing the bureaucracy.     

Politics of E‐Government: E‐Government and the Political Control of Bureaucracy

This case study reports an innovative e‐government experiment by a local government in Seoul, South Korea—Gangnam‐gu. A new local political leadership in Gangnam made strategic use of e‐government applications to exert greater political control over the local civil service bureaucracy. The authors find that e‐government applications possess political properties that can be applied effectively by the political leadership as instruments to improve control over the government bureaucracy as well as to enhance essential government accountability and transparency. The political circumstances underlying e‐government development as well as its impact on local government are reported, along with key variables associated with this innovation and directions for future research.     

A Mixed Relationship: Bureaucracy and School Performance

We argue the negative relationship between school bureaucracy and school performance that is commonly reported in the bureaucracy and educational policy literature is theoretically and empirically incomplete. Like most public agencies operating in complex task environments, we suggest that schools have to make trade-offs between the multiple outputs they are expected to produce. Bureaucracy plays an important role in determining the nature of these trade-offs: one that is more multidimensional than it is portrayed in the existing literature. We find bureaucracy's relationship with school performance depends on how performance is measured. It is negatively associated with test scores but positively associated with other performance measures such as attendance and dropout rates. This is consistent with an economies-of-scope perspective of bureaucracy, which emphasizes bureaucracy's role in managing the trade-offs inherent in pursuing multiple goals.     

The Chinese Paradox of High Growth and Low Quality of Government: The Cadre Organization Meets Max Weber

Much research has argued for the importance of state's administrative capacity for development. Disregard for the rule of law and failure to get corruption under control are seen as detrimental to economic and social development. The China paradox refers to the fact that in all commonly used measures of levels of corruption and the quality of government, China is a country that scores quite low. China also lacks the Weberian model of bureaucracy that is seen as central for development. It is argued that this paradox is the result of disregarding the existence of a different public administration model in China—the cadre organization. Instead of rule following, this organization is marked by high commitment to a specific policy doctrine. The argument is that while very different from Weberian bureaucracy, this organization is well suited for effectively implementing policies for economic and social development.     

Representative Bureaucracy: Rethinking Substantive Effects and Active Representation

This article addresses perceived deficiencies in the study of representative bureaucracy by explaining and classifying the sources of passive representation's substantive effects. This classification is used to clarify existing empirical research and normative thinking on active representation. Doing so produces a more modest but more accurate interpretation of existing research findings and helps to indicate future research needs. It also reduces normative disagreement to a single source of substantive effects, namely bureaucratic partiality. Minority bureaucratic partiality is of dubious value for helping minorities, and bureaucratic partiality should generally be rejected. However, a passively representative bureaucracy increases in importance because of its other sources of substantive effects. This demonstrates the need to go beyond the passive–active distinction: It is more adequate and accurate to speak of representative bureaucracy and the sources of its substantive effects.     

Determining ‘truth’ at the border: immigration interviews,Chinese marital migrants,and Taiwan's sovereignty dilemmas

As Taiwan transitions from an immigrant-sending to an immigrant-receiving country, it struggles to build an immigration bureaucracy while its status as a sovereign nation-state is not recognized by much of the international community. Taiwan's largest immigrant group, marital migrants from China, are perceived as posing the greatest challenges to border control due to longstanding political tensions between the two countries and governmental and societal suspicions about Chinese spouses' marital motives. Based on research conducted with immigration officials and during immigration interviews at the border, this article interrogates the status of ‘truth’ in official efforts to determine definitively immigrants' marital intentions. It analyzes such truth demands in relation to Taiwan's anxieties about its national standing and the ability of an immigration bureaucracy to generate ‘sovereignty effects’.     

Rethinking Loyalty and Competence in Presidential Appointments

Studies in presidential appointments, particularly principal-agent models, posit that presidents employ a top-down strategy to control the bureaucracy, one that promotes loyalty over competence. However, many studies have two critical limitations: (1) treating loyalty and competence as binary constructs and (2) focusing only on presidential nomination and Senate confirmation (PAS) appointments. In this article, the authors construct a continuous measure of loyalty and competence to determine how much loyalty or competence an appointee offers a president and examine other appointment tools—Senior Executive Service (SES), Schedule C, and presidential appointments—that allow presidents to influence different levels of the bureaucracy. Findings show that presidents are more likely to reward competence with their PAS and SES appointments. In addition, few appointees score high on both loyalty and competence, explaining why presidents generally must make a trade-off between loyalty and competence.     

A ‘Talent for Bureaucracy’: A.F. Davies and the Analysis of Government in Australia*

In an address in 2003, Senator Kim Carr cited A.F. Davies' much‐quoted observation that Australians have ‘a characteristic talent for bureaucracy’ (Carr 2003: 3). He referred to the achievements of bureaucrats like Nugget Coombs, then went on to discuss questions of accountability, values and political control in the Australian public service. How could the public service be responsive and responsible, and contribute to the maintenance of a democratic society, in today's world? Certainly, these were core concerns of Davies, as Walter argues in an insightful article (1999). Davies, Walter argues, ‘was concerned, throughout his career, with the links between bureaucracy and democracy’ (1999, 25), fearful that the life‐world is increasingly being structured by expertise, and in the domain of the experts, there is little room for individual voice, for passion, or for democratic control. Davies' concerns, and those of Carr and Walter, raise important questions about the way in which we understand the structure of government, the significance of our changing understanding for the democratic ideal, and the implications of these changes for social scientists.     

Top‐Down Self‐Organization: State Logics,Substitutional Delegation,and Private Governance in Russia

This study investigates the counterintuitive emergence of self‐regulation in the Russian construction sector. Despite its proclivity for centralizing political authority, the government acted as the catalyst for the delegation of regulatory powers to private industry groups. The article argues that a factor little considered in extant literature—namely, a weak and corrupt bureaucracy—is key to explaining why the normally control‐oriented executive branch began to promote private governance despite industry's preference for continued state regulation. The article's signal contribution is to theoretically explain and empirically demonstrate how a government's prior inability to establish intrastate control over an ineffective and bribable public bureaucracy creates incentives for political authorities to search for alternative means for policy implementation outside of existing state agencies. These findings are important for understanding the impetus and logic behind particular regulatory shifts in countries where the state apparatus is both deficient and corrupt.     

Coordinating the Government Bureaucracy in Hong Kong: An Institutional Analysis

The change in sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997 has brought about an interesting puzzle: despite a high degree of institutional continuity, the Hong Kong bureaucracy that was considered highly efficient during the colonial era has appeared to turn into an inept administrative structure generating blunder after blunder. The bureaucracy seems to face greater difficulties in horizontal coordination under the new governance, and has lost the ability to produce coherent policy actions.
Drawing upon a literature of institutional analysis, this article examines the institutional design for coordination in the Hong Kong government. The article argues that the bureaucracy in Hong Kong is designed upon a logic of colonial rule. Like any institutional arrangements, the colonial administrative system has inherent coordination limitations. During the colonial era, some smoothing mechanisms were developed as the lubricant for the bureaucracy's operation, but the new governance has inevitably impinged upon some of these—making the bureaucracy more prone to coordination problems.     

官僚体制的内在缺陷:新公共管理视角的分析

古典官僚制理论认为 ,官僚体制所体现的工具理性与价值理性的冲突是官僚体制自身不可超越的内在困境。在新公共管理的视角下 ,官僚体制不但存在工具理性与价值理性的冲突 ,在工具理性的内部也可能产生冲突 ,它所带来的效率也只是一种相当有限的机械效率。其内在缺陷就是缺乏竞争效率和创新机制 ,在政策制定和公共利益认定上偏离了原定的目标     

Beyond Weber: Conceptualizing an alternative ideal type of bureaucracy in developing contexts

The study of public administration in developing countries requires that we look beyond the Weberian model as the only ideal type of bureaucracy. When we assume that there exists only one gold standard of public administration, all other organizational forms that do not conform to the Weberian ideal are dismissed as corrupt or failed. Drawing on neo‐institutional economics, I introduce an alternative ideal type of bureaucracy found in contemporary China. This model, which I call bureau‐franchising, combines the hierarchical structure of bureaucracy with the high‐powered incentives of franchising. In this system, public agencies can rightfully claim a share of income earned to finance and reward themselves, like entrepreneurial franchisees. Yet distinct from lawless corruption, this self‐financing (or prebendal) behavior is sanctioned and even deliberately incentivized by state rules. Although such a model violates several Weberian tenets of “good” bureaucracy, it harnesses and regulates the high‐powered incentives of prebendalism to ameliorate budgetary and capacity constraints that are common in developing countries like China.     

论现代官僚制的双重困境

官僚制作为一种政府组织体制,奉行效率优先,体现了时代的工具理性精神.然而它面临着内外双重困境.在官僚政府内,有官僚体制与行政人员之间、行政目的与行政手段之间、政务官与常务官之间、官僚体制内部结构矛盾等四大矛盾;在外部环境上有官僚制与民主政治体制的矛盾、官僚制与资本主义社会之间的矛盾、官僚价值与民主价值的矛盾等三大矛盾.官僚制政府改革必须同整个政治体制的改革联系起来才有望成功.     

Assessing the Impact of Bureaucracy Bashing by Electoral Campaigns

The literature on the implications of electoral "bureaucracy bashing" for public management is thin. This is partly because of the difficulty of defining basic terms and measuring results in meaningful ways. Using focus group data, this article explores how senior federal managers perceive campaign bureaucracy bashing and assess its consequences. The participants perceive that candidate-based bashing affects federal management on two levels: one emotional, the other programmatic. The emotional impact is pronounced, producing frustration and hostility from senior managers toward political candidates, political appointees, and the media. Senior managers report that bashing adversely affects policy implementation through low morale, poor recruitment, and training and by fostering an environment of distrust toward bureaucracy. Grounded in a diverse literature relating to public administration, the presidency, campaigns and elections, and political communication, this inquiry finds that senior managers confirm many of the speculations these works raise about how bashing affects public employees and public policy.     

Bureaucracy and Radical Politics: The Case of the Greater London Council

New Left Organizational Theory contains a powerful critique of bureaucracy, and in its place offers a model of collectivist organization. This rejection of bureaucracy, however, is inadequate for understanding left political strategy in the advanced capitalist state. The experience of the radical Greater London Council during the early 1980s suggests a more dialectical critique of bureaucracy, one that recognizes structural opportunities for the democratic transformation of bureaucracy. This study outlines a Gramscian organizational theory that goes beyond New Left Organizational Theory by suggesting a strategy of participatory centralization for radical politics within the state.     

The Priming Effect of Corruption and Bureaucracy Bashing on Citizens’ Perceptions of an Agency’s Performance

Priming theories suggest that negative stories or events can affect how citizens feel about public organizations. However, research concerning the priming impact of both corruption and bureaucracy bashing—two relevant topics today—on how citizens perceive the performance of agencies is lacking. To close this lacuna in the literature, an experimental survey was conducted where respondents in the United States were randomly assigned to one of five performance vignettes. The results demonstrate that when participants were assigned to the vignettes containing the corruption and bureaucracy bashing cues, perceptions of performance were lower. This finding is consistent with priming theories. Moreover, differences within the corruption and bureaucracy bashing vignettes as well as between the corruption and bureaucracy bashing vignettes were not found. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed in the article.     

Perceptions of Discretion in Street-Level Public Service: Examining Administrative Governance in Romania

ABSTRACT

Street-level bureaucrats have long been seen as key figures in program and policy implementation, often occupying unique positions that encompass executive, legislative, and judicial functions. Osborne’s concept of the New Public Governance addresses concepts of policy implementation and interpretive activities that characterize street-level bureaucracy. Current understanding of street-level bureaucracy is, however, dominated by research focused on the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which demonstrate differences from countries in Eastern Europe. This study uses survey data to examine street-level bureaucracy in Romania, with attention to the determinants of bureaucratic perceptions of discretion. Results indicate that proactive personality, prosocial motivation, autonomy, job satisfaction, and years of experience are related to individual perceptions of discretionary latitude among front-line workers.